I have spent my professional career of three-and-a-half decades immersed in Congress. I love it--the legislative process, the gritty politics, the dedicated lawmakers who climb into the arena and the professional staffers who spend years, even decades, working long, punishing hours at sub-par wages to do something in the public interest.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

True, to love Congress requires a high tolerance for wince-inducing behavior, shamelessness, hypocrisy, money-grubbing, egomania, bloviating and miscreance. Those are all unavoidable in a democracy. But the House’s ethics and lobbying “reform” fiasco pushed me beyond the tolerance limit. What the House did last week is revolting and shameful.

The first revolting and shameful element came in the bill that emerged for floor consideration. It was embarrassingly weak--weaker even than the embarrassingly weak Senate bill that passed after Senators kept out any meaningful ethics standards and enforcement.

The evolution of the House effort was pretty strong: the extremely tough statements made by Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) after the indictment of former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) and the cascade of stories about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Michael Scanlon and others, and the pledge by Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in kicking off his campaign for Majority Leader that he was an original “Gang of Seven” reformer and would do it a second time. But the rapid retreat by Boehner, after pushback by his nervous colleague, made it pretty clear that the path to “reform” would be a downhill deterioration.

Still, I did not think that the House Republican leadership--specifically Hastert, Boehner and Rules Chairman David Dreier (Calif.)--would turn the process into a Giant Slalom.

The Rules Committee actually held a model hearing on these issues. I was part of a panel that testified for several hours, with deep, thoughtful and even hopeful exchanges that left me and others believing that there might be a few gestures toward real change, if not a truly meaningful and comprehensive package. And even after it became clear that any meaningful enforcement of ethics and lobbying requirements would be abandoned, there was at least the pledge that tough disclosure requirements would be part of the package.

Ha--that, too, was dropped like a hot rock. The package presented to the Rules Committee, which is scheduled to be up on the floor today and is presumably the product of several committees--is worse than a bad joke. In the face of the scandals now gripping Congress, it is a farce.

By itself, that would be dismaying. But the actions by the Rules Committee to deny votes on virtually any of the reasonable amendments offered to the bill, including several that were broadly bipartisan, were truly offensive and outrageous, and they demonstrated that the hearing in the committee was only for show.

Of course, Exhibit A here is the amendment sponsored by Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) to create an Office of Public Integrity that would oversee lobbying disclosure reports and investigate allegations of ethics violations. It would then report them to the ethics committee so it could decide whether action should be taken on them.

On this idea, no vote was allowed. Nor was a vote allowed to add as an amendment a measure to strengthen the hand of the ethics committee itself, offered by Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), the ousted chairman of the ethics committee, and Kenny Hulshof (R-Mo.), one of the panel’s stronger former members. (Boehner has said he will consider it later. If he does, you can bet it will be diluted into meaninglessness.)

And it gets worse. The House Government Reform Committee, in a striking burst of bipartisanship, passed the Executive Branch Reform Act of 2006 by a 32-0 vote, which included revolving door bans, protection for whistle-blowers and an end to secret meetings between executive officials and lobbyists. That’s 32 to nothing--yet the leadership refused to incorporate the provisions into the reform package, and the Rules Committee rejected a floor vote on an amendment that included the reforms offered by Reps. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the chairman and ranking member of the Government Reform Committee. All told, every meaningful amendment was summarily rejected, leaving a few cosmetic ones that were allowed to get votes by the full House on the floor.

The excuse given by Republican leaders for the weakness of their package is that Members don’t want reform. Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) was among many Republicans who said that during their visits back home, no one mentions scandal or reform. Boehner’s excuse was, “The status quo is a powerful force,” meaning that rank-and-file Members made it clear to him they do not want any real change in the rules or in enforcement except a few provisions that will discomfit lobbyists--and not much even of that.

If Doolittle’s contention is true, then why deny the House the opportunity to vote on meaningful change? After all, if Members don’t want it, they can vote it down and have nothing to fear from their indifferent constituents. And if Boehner is suggesting that his Members’ insistence on the status quo is what is blocking his efforts to get real reform, then what kind of leadership is that?

The House Republicans’ record during the 109th Congress on dealing with scandal and corruption is nothing short of scandalous itself, including decapitating the ethics panel’s leadership and trying to shield DeLay before his indictment. The total collapse of the ethics committee was predictable in the face of the earlier actions. This bill follows the same path.

As it happened, right after the shenanigans over the rule for the lobbying bill passed the House (narrowly), another story emerged: allegations that Cunningham and possibly other lawmakers were supplied with prostitutes by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, through a limousine service that itself has a fat contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

More revelations will surely follow. Congress’ leaders have shown they really don’t care if their colleagues were taking bribes or using hookers, much less that the oversight-deprived contracting process is broken. They are happy that there’s no ethics process to hold people accountable. If that’s not a culture of corruption, I’d like a better definition.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.